Dust, lint, and fibrous material are common byproducts of textile manufacturing. This waste can often result from several different processes and machines used in the textile industry. Examples include opening, combing, carding, and spinning of raw materials, such as cotton, wool, polyester fibers, and the like. To minimize the presence of these waste products in the air, and provide a more safe working environment for plant workers, large air filtration systems have been developed for use in textile plants. Properly capturing the dust and lint also helps maintain the desired ambient conditions for the ongoing industrial operations. Often, air filtration systems seek to pull or push the dirty air directly from the source of contamination, such as a spinning machine, to continuously and automatically clean the machine. As a result, the waste particles are less likely to enter the ambient environment of the textile plant.
Providing continuous cleaning of textile machinery, which may run for hours if not days without stopping, requires significant filtering capacity and can result in the collection of huge volumes of waste material. Suitable air filtration systems can collect enough waste material to produce nearly thirty 500-lb bales of waste per day in a mill producing two million pounds of product per week. In generally, an airstream is created, for example a high-vacuum airstream with a pressure between about ten and about thirteen inches of mercury (at least 60 inches of water), by a pump system. The airstream is pulled around and through the machinery that generates the waste to pick up (entrain) the contaminants. The airstream is then pulled to a receiver where the contaminants are separated from the airstream and collected. The clean air is then exhausted from the receiver as the clean air is pulled toward the pump system.
One known fiber and lint separating and collecting system is described by U.S. Pat. No. 5,217,509, which shares a common inventor and a common owner with the present disclosure. FIGS. 1 and 2 of the present description help summarize the prior art in the '509 patent. FIG. 1 shows a pair of receivers 10 placed on top of a hopper 12. Each receiver 10 includes a dirty air inlet 14 along the side of the receiver 10 and a clean air outlet 16 out the top of the receiver 10. The contaminants are separated from the airstream by a planar filter 18 as seen in FIG. 2. Periodically, a gate 20 is opened below the receiver 10 to dump the collected waste into the hopper 12. The hopper 12 leads the waste down into a baler 22. Depending upon the content, the bales of waste material may be reclaimed, sold or discarded. While one receiver 10 is dumping waste, e.g. running a dumping cycle, a valve 24 redirects the dirty air to the other receiver 10 such that the dirty air can be continuously received by one of the two receivers 10. During the dumping process, a back-flush of ambient and compressed air is forced through a cleaning inlet 26. The back-flush attempts to separate any contaminants that may be stuck to the planar filter 18. The clean air leaving the clean air outlet 16 is often pulled to a pump system 28 (FIG. 1).